Page 6
October 21, 2015
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O PINION
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An Attachment to the Weapons that Kill
Digging out
from the fear
and distrust
J ohn M orlino
Yes, it’s happened
again. A man with a le-
gally acquired arsenal
walked onto a college
campus. Moments later,
10 people were dead,
and nearly as many
wounded.
Sick to your stom-
ach? Of course you are. Surprised?
Didn’t think so.
Like Aurora, Newtown, and
a lengthy list of similar trage-
dies, the Oct. 1 mass shooting at
Umpqua Community College in
Oregon aimed the spotlight on
the debate over guns in America.
But there shouldn’t be a debate at
all.
Arguing that guns are a sacred
part of our culture just doesn’t cut
it anymore. They’re instruments
of death. Nothing else you can
own can kill more easily or effi-
ciently.
Guns in private homes extin-
guish the lives of loved ones far
by
more often than they prevent the
advance of an intruder. Children
shoot other children. Adults shoot
their spouses and their children.
Accidental death or suicide is just
a trigger pull away.
This, apparently, is the
price we’ve agreed to pay
to uphold a convoluted
interpretation of the Sec-
ond Amendment.
Sure, there’ll be calls
for background checks to
keep these weapons away
from people stricken with
severe mental illness,
served with a restraining order, or
convicted of violent crimes. But
gun owners appear to have noth-
ing to worry about.
After all, who’s going to sug-
gest disarming ourselves com-
pletely?
From the Brady Campaign to
Everytown for Gun Safety and
Americans for Responsible Solu-
tions, no prominent organization
purportedly working to end gun
violence — actually, they prefer
the word “reduce” — have been
willing to explicitly endorse giv-
ing up our firearms.
Instead, some of them — along
with nearly any elected official
you can think of — seem to go
out of their way to express sup-
port for the Second Amendment.
“Sensible” gun control, they say,
is their objective.
Making it harder for the most
troubled among us to acquire a
gun would, of course, be a good
thing. As would comprehensive
mental health care for all, and a
ban on assault weapons.
Yet well-intentioned as this
strategy may be, it’s cursed with a
deadly flaw: There’s no guarantee
that anyone deemed a “responsi-
ble gun owner” today will still be
one tomorrow.
The human mind is ev-
er-changing. And there’s no
end to the number of things that
can send people into a nosedive
— disintegrating relationships,
devastating unemployment, un-
lucky biology, profound trauma.
Passing a background check on a
given day does nothing to ensure
that a person buying a gun will
remain emotionally stable for the
rest of his or her life.
So how do we dig ourselves
out of this mess?
The answer, I believe, lies in
confronting the two-headed mon-
ster that’s left us in a state of per-
petual paralysis.
Fear and distrust lurk beneath
our collective psyche.
For example, people who
wholeheartedly distrust our lead-
ers delude themselves into think-
ing that, if properly armed, they’ll
prevail in an apocalyptic shootout
with the government.
Some gun buyers fear the
neighborhood “bad guy” and
comfort themselves by fantasiz-
ing about winning a duel in their
living room. Others fear the after-
math of a prolonged natural (or
man-made) disaster where fight-
ing over — rather than sharing —
food, water, and shelter becomes
the norm.
To varying degrees, the odds
would be stacked against us in
any of those situations — just as
they would be in a mass shooting.
It’s only on the front end that we
can improve our chances. The
sooner we develop a genuinely
compassionate and trusting soci-
ety, the less likely any of us will
find ourselves in such dire cir-
cumstances.
John Morlino is a former social
worker and founder of The ETHIC
(The Essence of True Humanity Is
Compassion).